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Saturday, April 05, 2008

Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 Catalog Management

Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 Catalog Management

I managed to delete my keywords! Did this by selecting all which I assumed would only select the current folder and in fact selected all 15,000+ entries. I then deleted, thankfully only entries and not base photo, and so lost all keyword data. However as I am prone to do this and also worried about depending only upon a program for keyword data I write the keywords into the EXIF data of the file, a command within PSE, although I sometimes forget this. So I was able to recover 95% of my keyword data when I reloaded the photos.

I had to move dozens of keywords around to re-create the original keyword structure, realising in the process that my keyword standards had room for improvement. Anyway at the end of this 4 hours of work I decided to backup what I could of this keyword and catalog information, I always back up the photos in a separate procedure.

First I noticed that in PSE 6 you can export/import catalogue keyword structure t a XML file,(see Adobe Forum ) so I did this. Then I created a new catalogue to act as a copy for my main one. This had no photos so start with. First import Keyword structure created above and then to load photos once more only this time I did not have to rebuild the keyword structure, so it only took about 30 minutes, most of this processing so that I got on writing this log.

I now propose to go through keywords and improve structure, writing outcome to photos EXIF data s I proceed, but I will do this in small intervals during the next month.

I now can select from two catalogs, one which I have called a copy. I intend once the Keyword Structure is improved to have two catalogs and to flip-flop between them so that I have only to recreate the last weeks work if it should fail. I will also copy catalog to a USB Hard Drive every month.

1 comment:

fader5 said...

I've deleted by way of a reinstall of win7 all of my programs and photos ect. I had my pictures on a backup drive and was able to recover 99% of them but all my keywords are gone. I'm using pse9 and still have my pse6 and pse4. You can see the keywords in windows Explorer Any suggestions to get them back?